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Comment by vz8 | Hacker News Reader

As I write this, I am attempting to reduce the number of licenses allocated in the Adobe admin portal.

After hunting through the site, it appears easy to add, but impossible to remove licenses without going through sales support (instant response with a human), who then transfer you to the "Cancellation Team" which are remarkably hard to find online and have not replied to previous attempts at cancellation.

This is my third try, and the wait has been ridiculous. After finally being connected to a member of their cancellation team, they are "reviewing my request" and 1-2 minutes (please stand by) has turned into 15+

This experience has been so bad (on top of many others), that I'm strongly considering moving our entire org to open source tools (aside from InDesign for the publications group, which our partners require).

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Following up: 50 minutes in chat and 5 rounds of back and forth like a used car dealership before they would agree to cancel.

Adobe: "Have 3 months free!"

Me: "We are no longer using these licenses."

Adobe: "But you are on the hook for a year. We have reset all of your licenses to have the same annual renewal date, regardless of when you purchased them."

Me: "We are no longer using these licenses. Free months are just a tactic in hopes that we miss the cancellation window and are forced to pay for another year."

Adobe: "We highly recommend that you accept our generous 3 months free offer."

Me: "That sounds a little ominous. Please cancel the licenses, effective immediately."

This is paraphrased, but follows the essential conversation. Adobe, you disappoint me.

What's worse is the poor employee forced to do this day in and day out.

They're getting commission when they succeed.

Doesn't mean they like it

Sure, but such cognitive dissonance usually gets resolved in the long run, and the easiest way is to somehow convince yourself you're doing the right thing after all.

That sounds like every excuse-making Facebook and Google employee on HN.

Some do. They are the ones who make careers in sales. They enjoy the challenge of getting people to buy stuff that they really don't want.

Or in the case Wells Fargo, they're threatened with being fired if they don't meet sales quotas using unethical and illegal means. Then they're fired anyway when they are caught.

isn't that awful? sigh.

Tell them they're engaging in racketeering and you're going to file a complaint with your state AG.

I wonder if this would work for SiriusXM and/or AT&T with their ever-creeping upward prices and reduced offerings - SiriusXM takes over non-sports channels for sports throughout the year, and at&t threatened to perma-ban my SIM cards if we tethered, even though i bought the SIM cards with the understanding that all three would be allowed to tether at-will. See, they removed "overages" but eliminated tethering during the full swing of pandemic, so that's the "new normal". I'll lay 50 for 1 that sometime this year they'll bring back overages, but not tethering.

This sounds like me trying to uninstall Adobe Creative Cloud only to be stopped by an 'error' each time.

I will never use an Adobe product ever again. I know many that feel the same way.

I haven't used creative cloud in a while and wanted to uninstall it: you need to log into the service and go through all updates in order to uninstall it.

Their new business model feels so invasive.

I actually booted up an old laptop the other day, there was creative cloud sitting very smugly knowing it's probably not leaving any time soon...

Yet later, all the complaining when one uses pirated versions of their products. A company that behaves in these ways flatly deserves no consideration when choosing to simply use pirated editions of their software. Many people are way too forgiving of what should be considered blatantly shitty behavior by vendors yet heap blame on those who don't pay "fairly" for using the same company's products.

I don't think you should fight bad behaviour with a different kind of bad behaviour.

This just increases the overall badness in the world.

Unfortunately I do not know the solution; their product is simply good, and the alternatives are all lacking in some ways.

I agree with the general reasoning of what you say but in this case (and some others we could name) I'm tempted to call it a form of protest even. Basically letting them know that: "Your product is good enough that I respect it, but i think i'm justified in working around the way you've set up payment for it through so many dishonest dark patterns that some of them might arguably even be illegal themselves. So fix yourselves a bit first before acting like the only victims".

In Adobe's defense, I had the opposite experience. We weren't using a product, and noticed that we'd been billed for 5 months for it.

They offered 3 months free. I asked if they could apply it retroactively since they could see we hadn't used it, and no longer needed it. Bit of a crazy request, but they did it!

If you do, please be sure to donate (time or money) to the open source projects to help better them! This is how open source can exceed commercial software. At the very worst case, if the projects tumble there's always a possibility to "fork" as an insurance policy.

We do, and thanks for mentioning it, it's worth bringing up.

We donate to various projects: on Github, FSF, EFF, direct to a developers, and even Patreon in one case.

Autodesk had our money for a while, then we moved to use and support Blender and never looked back.

... we even bought a license to WinRAR, I kid you not.

WinRAR isn't Open Source. I'm curious though, why go with rar rather than, say, 7z?

On our devices with Windows, we use the built-in tools, 7-zip and WinRAR (on a single workstation).

Mentioning WinRAR was a bit of a joke.

Holy shit that's awful.

I thought the advantage of subscription software is that you don't need to pay an expensive one time fee if you need software just for a short project. But if they make it hard to cancel, that really sucks.

I'm so glad I moved away from Adobe...

If you're doing what I think you are, this is not possible except in the month that your yearly contract renews. I went through the same thing.

You've most likely got yearly licences that you pay off monthly, which means you can only modify on a yearly basis, so they don't let you modify most of the year.

So adobe has taken the healthcare approach to subscriptions? Wait for “open season” to adjust your cancellations.

Moving tooling is Hard, and the OSS stuff frankly sucks in comparison.

Give the Affinity [1] suite a serious look. It's not Photoshop or Illustrator, but for many users it really is a functional alternative and much of the tooling works similarly enough that it's usable (unlike much of the OSS stuff which just gets maddening). Pricing is also very sane.

[1] https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

I was a casual user of Illustrator but got tired of the monthly subscription and it wasn't really worth the money since I would only use it like 5 times a month. I moved to Affinity designer about 4 years ago and I love it.

I use Affinity Designer for Mac (an Illustrator alternative). (90 day free trial, and then $40 one time after that - for lifetime ownership). So done with Adobe - their software is a total system hog, and they are now sketchy as an organization.

Truly disgusting. Why is it normal to be able to sign up for a service (such as internet service) completely self-service, with no human interaction, but as soon as I want to cancel the service, I have to call a 1-800 number and interact with a human? Comcast/Xfinity does this. Anti-consumer at best.

Adobe also charges 3 (I think) months penalty if you cancel CC. I have recently learned that if you reference covid-19 they immediately process anything you want with no penalties.

I suspect they don't want to end up on the wrong side of a crowdsource shitlist for penalizing people during the pandemic.

This is exactly how Spectrum and SiriusXM are as well. Easy to buy/upgrade, hard to cancel.

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